Why You Need a Water Filter

Increasingly, we're hearing that substances including hormones, drugs, and gasoline additives are showing up in our tap water. However these chemicals, called emerging contaminants, aren't regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Scary, isn't it? To find out if there's anything you can do about it, we worked with world renowned water expert Shane Snyder, Co-Director of the Arizona Laboratory for Emerging Contaminants and Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at the University of Arizona (UA) to see if water filtering pitchers and refrigerator filters - even though they don't claim to be so - are effective at filtering out these unregulated chemicals from your water.

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Under our direction, municipal water samples from Tucson, Arizona were spiked with 15 emerging contaminants including ibuprofen (pain reliever), fluoxetine (antidepressant), BPA (bisphenol A), and atrazine (herbicide). To simulate the weeks or months of use that pitcher and fridge filters would get in a real household, researchers at UA passed gallons of contaminated water through each filtering device until it reached its manufacturer's estimated lifetime.

The good news is that both of the refrigerator and the 3 top-selling filters we tested worked well, although some worked longer than others to filter the dirty 15. Want to know more about emerging contaminants and which filters worked? Check out our stories, Is Your Tap Water Safe? and Filters that Really Work. Once you have purchased a filter, make sure that you change the filter at least as frequently as suggested by the manufacturer, to optimize its performance.